Man is condemned to be free.

Jean-Paul Sartre

 
 

And I am he and she.
Running.
Towards each other.
Moon towards dawn.
Because the sun rises.


 

 

Licorice Pizza is a caress that (ac)takes you by surprise. The kind that leaves a mark, much deeper and more lasting than certain slaps. Those caresses so light as to be indelible. Which leave the design, that of a future that perhaps. Because this is the time when. Because we are here and now, but also elsewhere and always. It is the gestation of love, the genesis of the world, the word of God, the heart that beats and learns to recognize its beats, the principle of falling in love: that is, that period that goes from the end of the dream to the beginning of the lips. Which have the only possible taste. The one of the person who makes your heart explode. Licorice pizza.
 
He is fifteen years old. She's twenty-five.
It's America in the seventies.
Everything is a possibility.
 
Gary and Alana.
Alana and Gary.
Different, for social extraction, for the way of approaching life, for the ways of interfacing with reality. But tremendously similar, in the power of desires, which revolve around the same focus: finding one's place in the world, to feel, to paraphrase Stuart Kauffman, at home in the universe.
 
Gary. High school, his fifteen years. The actor already has dreams. He is enterprising, travels, knows how to move, always looking for something new, which is always the same thing: his autonomy, the awareness of being there. With a little brother, a mother who is only seen for a few moments and a father about whom we know nothing (and to think that Gary is Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour: the absence of the father figure can be read in a million ways). Friends, the theatre, the difficulties of choices, the fear of the future, which seems so far away, that he is already here. The dirty hands of adolescence. The desires that fall from the eyes. Something unknown that stirs at the bottom of his heart, to which he cannot give a name.

Alana. Twenty-five years old, she walks nervously in the courtyard of the high school where she works. The world is so small for him, she is immense, she wants to be, but she doesn't know how. She is determined, yet undecided: because she is constantly balanced between a destiny that seems already written and an indomitable desire to be its protagonist. She tries to emerge in every possible way from the existential quagmire in which she feels she is sinking. Alana is the surprising Alana Haim, who gives the character all her imperfect beauty. A face that seems to have come out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting discovered too late. She moves in a world that sometimes seems like a cage, sometimes like a home. Family, work, intolerance, boys, men, residues of adolescence, ferocious youth, the future at any cost. The desires that fall from the eyes. Something unexpected that reveals itself at the bottom of her heart, the name of which she struggles to recognise.

Licorice Pizza is a praise to lightness, which is never rhetorical: because she has the heart of darkness. It is an existential fresco full of content, full of trajectories of meaning. There is a sense of melancholy sweetness that pervades all glances, all camera movements. Melancholy for memories never experienced (Alana and Gary, but also us spectators), for futures and lives that took place only in the imagination. This is the elsewhere that Pessoa talks about, that sense of transience that Freud talks about when he talks about Rilke. This is what I mean when I talk about here and now, elsewhere and always. Because Licorice Pizza is not a love story: but it is the story of its genesis. It is the complex, tortuous, shocking process of recognizing the feeling that changes everything, that breaks in and subverts every order. It is the story of caterpillars that become butterflies: the ones that will fly into the stomach of those who fall in love.
 
And they are he and she, but they are also He and She. Afraid, courageous, explosive, true. They are not "beautiful", but they are authentic, and therefore wonderful. Ephemeral yet eternal, and vice versa. Gary and Alana like each other, they look for each other, they move away, they are always together. They run, that's all they do. Because, without fail, you love running. The only speed allowed in love is maximum speed. And then we run. Crazy, smiling, happy. Without knowing where to go, but going there together.
 
In Licorice Pizza there are no characters except Alana and Gary. I mean they are all extras: this is their story, they all act as foils (including Sean Penn, Tom Waits and Bradley Cooper). As in Quino's or Schultz's strips, there are no adults, and if there are they act as a backdrop. There's her and him, just them. Indeed: only them. The rest is night.
 
It contains the heart of the seventies. Music, war, the oil crisis ("how did you think mattresses were made?"), drugs, the porn industry, homosexuality and integration, Streisand, politics and young people, the spirit of entrepreneurship, youth movements, affirmation and female participation. And all the rest. You can see, you can feel the sense of change, History is about to complete its merry-go-round, one of the most unexpected and stunning ones (assuming that predictable and soft ones exist): young people are finally the protagonists of historical becoming social. Alana and Gary fit - or are simply inserted - into the flow of consciousness of a decade that profoundly marked the imagination and culture of our world. Gary and Alana: they are the story.
 
Licorice Pizza. Delicate, soft, hinted. Exactly like the love he talks about. Embryo of a feeling that has the strength of a billion bombs. A cardiac eruption, which the lover's heart tries to suffocate in every way. So they move away, they pretend they don't want each other, they try to look for each other elsewhere. Alana, who unlike Gary, lives with a condition existential of more accentuated instability, tries in every way to emerge from the life to which it seems to be condemned. He will cling to anyone, in an attempt not to sink into an already written existence. Yet she never really pushes Gary away, this fifteen-year-old boy who seems to only have an adolescent crush, the result of an indomitable and fleeting hormonal storm (on their first date she tells him exactly this). They look into each other's eyes and see something that looks an awful lot like the future. Alana loves life. The look she wears when she finds herself sitting on the sidewalk, towards the end of the film, is a hymn to the desire for life. Alana running.
 
And there's Gary, who talks constantly, who has a thousand ideas, a thousand projects, and the theater and the water mattresses and the games room. Young entrepreneur, boy hungry for life. The phone call scene is wonderful. A silence full of adolescence and boiling love. He is blooming but he doesn't know it. Just like Alana, worried about getting stuck in the mud of not choosing. Gary continually reinvents himself, tries - even naively (how much he resembles his father, the young Cooper, in certain movements, in certain expressions) - to make space for himself in the world while maintaining his identity. Gary loves life. The look he wears when he finds himself talking to Alana, in moments when defenses are lowered, is a song of life. Gary running.
 
Licorice Pizza has a huge amount of memorable moments. Scenes, even very small ones, jokes, glances, passages. It never becomes banal or rhetorical. But it continually revolves around the fire that beats in the hearts of its two characters. And the truck in reverse, her falling off the motorbike, the mayoral candidate at the restaurant, the queues at the petrol station, the interview where you always have to say yes, and the dinner at Alana's house with Gary's friend and " I don't speak Chinese": in short, this film is a fresco of snapshots that are the synthesis and expansion of a beauty tinged with lightness, melancholy, tenderness, sweetness and the disorientation one feels when faced with infinity.
Because love is a sea of ​​fog.
And we are travelers immersed in the storm.